


hear it humming

by thekeybladeschosen



Category: Death Note (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, aka all angst bc I'm SAD, aka i only got into this series in the cursed year of 2020 bc why not, dont @ me, help I'm feeling, like honestly what the hell, the English concept album SLAPS., we do. in fact. reference the musical here.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:13:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25121449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekeybladeschosen/pseuds/thekeybladeschosen
Summary: death calls.once quietly.louder later.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 6





	hear it humming

**Author's Note:**

> uhhhhh did i go into death note blind in 2020 while quarantined and let it take over my entire life and cant quit listening to the English musical demo and plan to watch everything except noteflix?
> 
> maybe.  
> i saw L and felt Seen by his little habits and quirks and honestly how dare. I've only had him for a few days and i miss him idk how y'all did this for so long
> 
> (also i gave the briefest mention of someone the musical ending. leave me alone.)

L is going to die.

The man is young, as healthy as an insomniac with a sugar addiction can be.  
Yet death calls, there's no denying that.

He knows it, he feels it deep in his bones.

Isn't this too soon? Is this simply the price he must pay for revealing his face finally, for being so convinced he could win this game that he stopped using his carefully crafted safety net and showed himself, stepping out of the dark and into the sun?

As far as he can deduce, Kira - Light - cannot kill him with just his face.  
Yet he knows its coming anyway. How exactly it'll be managed is another question, since as far as he knows, Light cannot reach the book, and hasn't shown any inclination of being able to kill with just a face before... His thumb comes to rest on his bottom lip, the nail grazing his teeth.  
Perhaps Light could do so ever since he touched that book and was simply toying with everyone, keeping up some sick charade while he prepared to strike. This is all something L would normally find fascinating, but even that very thought is dampened. Maybe, despite the fact they're closer than ever now, enough so that he assumes someone will finish his work, he really still is depressed by this case. 

The bells are ringing.  
Is this the way it ends, now?

It is. The message is clear. 

L Lawliet is going to die. The man with no name anyone here knows, the man Wammy House would never betray the info of. Will his headstone be unmarked entirely, he wonders? Or will an alias be etched upon it?

No matter. Watari will see to it. That'll be fine.

Death calls for him, and he wonders if anyone will pay the price for it. If anyone will truly mourn him, besides Watari and his top two contenders.

Oh. He ought to see to that...  
As soon as he thinks this is a priority it slips away, kind of. He wants to focus on it, but his brain is preoccupied with thoughts of dying.

It'll be sometime soon, by the end of the day if his guess is accurate. 

The bells simply won't stop ringing. Even the storm can't drown them out. 

"I wish we could've met some other way."  
"This is the only way we could've met."

Yeah.

What a shame.

Light has stepped out into the rain, feigning concern as L stands there soaked by the downpour, wishing the bells would cease. That he managed to get Light to leave his dry safety doesn't even register as a petty win in his childish brain. The bells are too loud. They're for him, but he doesn't want them. Not yet. Perhaps this is fear he's feeling.

As they sit at the computer, his plan being told to the task force, in the back of his head L thinks how he's following his routines today, but it doesn't feel right. It feels like something else is controlling his arms, his head. And as soon as he thinks it, that's how he 100% knows its finally coming. Soon. He has mere minutes.

He wishes Light wasn't Kira. Wishes that if he said this clear as day fact aloud right now, anyone would believe it. 

L has never had a friend. An equal.  
Irrationally, he wanted Light to be innocent almost, maybe more, than he wanted him to be guilty.  
He was so sure, and as usual he wasn't wrong, but he'd have loved to be.

When Light had taken a towel to his hair, staring at him with those eyes that were less kind than they'd been not too long before, he'd felt a twinge of despair. _It'll be lonely, won't it?_  
The man he'd been chained to, stayed up late investigating and pouring all his energy into, even sort of cared for, was gone. L would soon follow.

Alarms sound, and real panic flares. Watari is gone. The mass deletion proves it, and his brain is frozen even as he begins to shout. It was stupid, an oversight to think Light would leave Watari alone, that the kind old man would be safe. Watari was invaluable, the next L will need him, will Roger be abl-

The pain hits.  
He's falling.

If only Light wasn't Kira.  
'Light...I wish it hadn't gone this way.' he wants to say, but words fail him. L hates how hopeless this feels, how much he failed. 

The last thought he has even as he stares into those eyes he's spent so much time studying, the eyes he saw the change in immediately when they retrieved the death note from Higuchi.

I wish you were just yourself, Light Yagami. I wish you were innocent like you claimed for so long.  
I hope they catch you.

Light is smirking, and L is so sad. He didn't want to lose, the game or his rare hopeful thoughts. 

The door is closing. The bells are tolling. The game is ended for him.

Light Yagami is dying. Blood pours from wounds he can hardly feel anymore, and the running couldn't have helped. 

Truth be told, he's almost amazed he's held on this long. It'd been too easy, hadn't it? His careful composure had slipped, so sure of victory that grown careless, hadn't he?  
Takada, Mikami, they'd been the newest pawns and the least useful long term. Kira should have known better, and not introduced new players so late in the game.

He almost regrets how he treated Misa. She would've done anything for him, and betrayed nothing. She would've been useful, for all her other faults.  
Casting her off had been a mistake.

Would it have mattered, though?  
The world had been boring and empty since L had died in his arms five years ago.

"You'll never ever get away" L's expression had said that day, watching him so sadly with those big dark eyes, as if he'd known even as he stood in the rain that this was it, as Light had restrained the need to laugh desperately.

How could he not see he was slated for death? Couldn't he hear his life growing fainter? L seemed to believe he could still catch Light, but he was a God. He'd outsmarted him!

"You and I will be parting ways soon", L had said, and Light has thought on that more than he'd care to admit. L had a way of unnerving him.

Victory should've been sweet, but as he'd lost his cool at L's grave, shouting and taunting a dead man, he'd realized it had setbacks.  
Remorse was terrible company.

It made no sense. It had all gone according to plan. 

No one left to challenge his rule.  
False leads on a case he ran now, appearances too easy to keep up as he'd removed anyone who would never betray L and would've ratted him out as a fake.  
Light had told himself it had worked out all as intended. Rem couldn't threaten him any longer, turned to dust as she was. Foolish, to be willing to die for love, and he couldn't deny he had wanted to spite her and remove her reason for doing so...but he kept Misa anyway due to the eyes. His family at a safe distance, mother and sister a background thought, and his father proud to the end of his perfect son. 

Regret wasnt part of the plan.  
Caring for L and liking their game wasn't in the plan.

He'd missed it, so badly. The conversations, the thrill. The way L rose to meet his every challenge.

The friendship.

The fact that maybe, perhaps, if he'd never gotten the Death Note back, he could see them growing closer. Friends for real, equals, partners.

He could see an entirely different life, a life where he didn't contemplate removing his sister, where his father hadn't died. Where neither of them died on a cold hard surface way too young.

But L stood in the way, and that future couldn't ever have been. He couldn't have that. To be God, one had to remove dissenters.

Then N had popped up, cumbersome and annoying but, in his mind, all too easy. And where was the challenge in that? He couldn't be overpowered by someone sitting in L's shadow.

Near could never be L. He didn't deserve to succeed to that title. That child was NOTHING compared to L, Light had thought. He didn't earn respect, his skill wasn't as impressive.  
He was nothing.

But...Near had beat him.

Had that been because Light had grown sloppy, or because L had set it up that way to watch him fall off his throne? It couldn't be anyone but L that could challenge him, right?

Light Yagami, 23 years old, the god of a world who would never know he'd been watching over them and judging accordingly, improving their world, beaten by the legacy L left behind.

Did that mean L won the game after all?

Full body shudders rack him as he falls to the stairs, breath rattling in his lungs.

Maybe he could still get out of this. Maybe-

No. What must the life span above his head look like now, if he were to relinquish the death note and it could be seen? Was it ticking away quickly?  
It didn't seem right.

Ryuk might still show up and they could- what? What then?  
Would Ryuk still find him interesting enough to keep around if his time isn't up?

Shuffling sounds and he raises his line of sight, wondering who could've or would have bothered to follow him here.  
Dark hair, dressed in white...

No.

Is that-  
Could it be?

As he lays there, he can't see the face fully, obscured as it is by the setting sun.  
Light tries to find his voice, to say something, as his rival stands there, impossibly, but oh so familiar.

How fast a minute spends, he wonders. How long will they look at each other like this.  
How is he here?

The sun moves, and he can see the face he'd never forget, the one he would never admit he'd missed, finally. It felt like a punch in the gut. It felt worse than the bullet wounds he was bleeding out of.

"Hello, Light."  
L smiles sadly at him, hands in his pockets, slouched over as always. Unchanged, frozen forever at 25.  
Here to watch him die in some cruel twist, the same as he had watched the life fade from those eyes.

"L..." he whispers.  
L blinks, standing rooted in that spot instead of coming closer.  
Light wishes he would. He's about to raise his arm out, and beg, because he wants to know if he could feel anything substantial about the other man, if this ghost would still smell like sugar-

and it happens.

The muscles in his chest constrict, Light gasping. Ryuk had decided to end it after all. Is this how L had felt? Is this pain how all his victims had felt?

Please. Just a minute more! He has so much to say, and he won't have another chance.

Does L know he regretted it, as his life ended? That he couldn't do it, hence why he'd manipulated Rem into it? Pretending Misa was in danger he could've easily removed her from by forcing her to relinquish ownership, but carefully didn't do, so the shinigami would kill L for him, because he shouldn't- couldn't- 

didn't want to, actually.

L's large, dark eyes are so knowing.  
After all, he'd known all along.

Has he come to mock him?  
How much longer does he have? How many seconds are left- the pain is so bad- 

"How could I not see this coming?" L says softly. Is it rhetorical? About his own death, or about Light's end?

What did you see, L? he wants to scream, to beg.  
His body is betraying him.

"Light...its time to rest." L adds, softly with no hint of malice, in that oh so quiet voice of his.

Light wants to scoff, but he's out of breath as pain radiates through his chest.

There won't be any rest for him- he doesn't get to go to heaven or hell. There's nothing for him. This was it.

He wonders if L remembers that rule. L never forgot anything, so he must.

Wonders how it could end like this.

Soon night will be fully falling, judging by the way the red light is fading. He wonders if L finds some kinda wit in the idea that Light is fading with the sun, that he's dying as the moon will be rising soon, the characters his name is written in.

Brown eyes close, the last red tinge gone, as his heart finally stops. 

L's sad smile, a hand raised to his mouth, big eyes so dark and knowing, is his last sight, and its caused his eyebrows to uncrease, his face to smooth out. 

Kira is no more.

Somewhere on the tallest structure, Ryuk is chuckling.  
Those humans are so...interesting.

On another structure, Misa Amane's arms are outstretched, palms up, emptying out a vial of dust onto the scenery below, unaware of what Rem gave for her, but knowing somehow its okay to let the strange substance she's held onto for so long go now.

And maybe somewhere, if the rules aren't completely true, L and Light will be reunited and have another chance, without Kira in the way.


End file.
